The Little Bear and the Shepherdess

With Mama, Papa, and Goldie dead, my life changed. I was in the care of Grandma Ursula and Grandpa Paddy. They didn't much care for the grand house on the estate, and truth be told, I didn't much care for it either. We had all the money from Mama, Papa, and Goldie's life insurance policies and all the money from the business—the empire that replaced me in their lives.

"What should we do with the house," Grandma asked one evening while we sat on the back terrace, (or veranda, as Goldie liked to call it) of the expansive house. We looked out to the orangerie, to the arcade, to the large cow barn, to the greenhouse, to the gardeners' shed, and to the various cottages where the many groundskeepers, housekeepers, and gardeners were housed. Beyond all the greenery, lush foliage, and thick fabric of trees, lay a seawall, with a large lake on the other side. On a warm evening, we would watch the lake darken, and then each morning, any morning, we could watch the sun rise over the lake. It never seemed to grow routine, being able to watch my corner of the earth awaken from her sleep. I began each morning sitting on one of the terrace steps with a mug of hot tea with honey and lemon. We made plans to build a large cottage on the estate and decided we would live there. We weren't in a hurry, but we felt chased by shadows and poor decision making the longer we remained in the house

Grandma and Grandpa re-hired Susan, my nanny, with the flaming red hair and the rosebud red lips. They interviewed her, checked, and re-checked her credentials and references before giving their final stamp of approval. "We're too old to keep up with everything you need to learn and where you need to go," Grandpa said. "Susan seems like someone you like and, at one time, trusted. Would you be all right with bringing her back?"

Grandma's eyes were watery. Neither of them wanted to hire a nanny, but they were aware of the limitations aging had thrust upon them. I nodded my head in agreement. Susan truly saw me as I was. A little, lost bear, in need of caring and nurturing parents. Grandma and Grandpa were caring and nurturing, but they were getting older, and more tired, and caring for a little one was a lot of work. They were anything but absentee. They took me for walks in the woods, and we had dinner together every night. They tucked me in bed each night, unless they fell asleep in front of the television or out on the terrace after watching the stars come out to light up the lake.

Susan took me to school each morning and picked me up after. She drove a smart car that Grandma, Grandpa, and I purchased for her. We all went to the car dealership and were most definitely a strange quartet. The salesman wasn't sure who was in charge, but we left the choice of car to Susan, and Grandpa handled all the payment details. Susan chose the new VW Buzz, which was the newer version of the VW bus. I was so happy she chose it because it seemed like it belonged to a simpler time, a time when people cared about how everyone around them felt, a time when people clung to personal convictions with love in their hearts and not with bullets in guns in their hands, pockets, and backpacks.

At first, when Mama, Papa, and Goldie died, the kids at school felt sorry for me, and for a while, I was visible—no longer the strange little fellow in the weird sailor clothes. Eventually, though, the novelty of being an orphan wore off. In the early days, I heard whispers in the boys' bathroom how it was strange I didn't seem sad. And I wasn't sad. I had my friend, Jimmy, and I had Grandma, Grandpa, and Susan. It was more than I had before Mama, Papa, and Goldie died. Our house was no longer full of strangers traipsing in and out, arranging this and that, moving things here and there, looking for dimmer or brighter light, and the perfect pop of color or muted hue to best emphasize a feature of Blondie's, Mama's, or Papa's, or some strange concoction on the stove or in the oven engineered to be incredibly sumptuous for a special dinner or party or evening 'in' with friends to view the perfect holiday movie marathon. In the absence of all the strangers, the house seemed like a crypt or even a long-forgotten museum wing where all the exhibits had gone to sleep years and years ago. At dinner one night, I put my fork down and stopped eating. I looked at the fresh caught salmon filet on my plate, festooned with tiny wisps of dill weed and two thinly sliced lemons that looked out at me like bright shiny yellow eyes.

"Charlie, is everything all right?" Susan asked.

Grandma and Grandpa stopped eating, concern etching both their faces. "Charlie?" Grandma asked.

"I'm fine, everyone, really," I stated. "I think it's time to move. I think it's time to build our new home. This place never felt like home to me." I sighed and thought back to our small cottage in the earlier years of my life. It was very small, but it was warm, cozy, and served no purpose in perpetuating a pretense about its inhabitants. I had been happy there, and I knew I could be happy again in something much smaller, much simpler, and much less reminiscent of the nothing I had always been in this monument to my parents' and Goldie's success.

One afternoon, a photographer contacted Grandma and Grandpa. Susan and I were on the terrace. She was sketching the sailboats on the lake, and I did phonics sheets from school. I was determined to start reading before I began kindergarten in the fall. The photographer mentioned she had a daughter who was in my pre-school class. I knew her. She had sunshine yellow hair, always tied up in a ponytail on each side of her head. Her hair was always curled, and the curls bobbed with every step she took. Her hair never changed, but her ribbons and bows always matched what she was wearing. At five years old, she was known for the bows, and everyone called her Bo.

Susan and I stopped what we were doing to eavesdrop on the phone call now on speaker. The photographer said, "People Everywhere would like to do a story, and they requested I take the photos. Since I'm local, everything is easier if we need to re-shoot, or we determine we need different photos."

Grandpa boomed into the speaker. He wasn't angry—it was just his talking voice was extraordinarily loud. He boomed, though, saying, "We'd love to have you take all the photos of the big house that you want. We'll be building something smaller on the estate where we're going to live. That big house seems wasteful for just the three of us, and I feel like a predatory boss having people cooking, cleaning, and managing all the hardscapes surrounding the house."

"Would you, your wife, and Charlie like to visit my farm? We can create an outline for the article and send it on to the writer. We can even provide the writer with the basic facts about the two of you and Charlie, and how everyone is getting along," the photographer said. "Charlie can play with my daughter, Beulah. Everyone at school just calls her 'Bo'. Maybe Charlie has mentioned her?" Sharon paused a beat. "Anyway, the two of them could keep company for an hour or two. Please, say yes. I already squeezed so many lemons to have fresh lemonade, and there's no way Beulah and I can drink all of this lemonade just the two of us."

"Oh, dear, are you widowed?" Grandma asked.

"I am," said Bo's mother. "I lost my husband during the pandemic. He developed multiple myeloma at the very end of the pandemic. He was doing all right until one day, his breathing became difficult. We thought it was just a serious and sudden onset of Covid." Her eyes took on a faraway glint, and we all could tell she was going back to that day. "It wasn't Covid or even the cancer that killed him. He had a blood clot that broke off and went to his brain, and that was it."

"Oh, sweetheart," Grandma said, "that's just awful. I'm so sorry. Paddy, Charlie, and I would be happy to visit you and your farm."

I looked at Susan and whispered, "Looks like you're going to get an afternoon off."

"Isn't Bo the little girl who no one likes?" Susan whispered back.

"Yeah," I said. "She's not a nice person."

***

Bo and her mother lived in an Italianate farmhouse. It was a two story home with tall ceilings on both floors, but the ceilings were especially tall on the second floor. When we arrived, both Bo and her mother, Sharon, answered the door to welcome us inside their home. Bo wasn't terribly happy to see us. As soon as we crossed the threshold, Bo shot around the corner and disappeared to the family room.

Sharon had a nice charcuterie board made up, and next to it was a cold pitcher of fresh lemonade with condensation marring the blue transparent glass on the exterior, tiny drops of water threatening to coalesce to form rivulets that would stream down the sides and leave water marks on the table.

Sharon spread an arm toward the table and said to Grandma and Grandpa, "Why don't you two make yourselves at home. I'm going to take Charlie to Beulah, and get them situated."

I followed Sharon to the family room. She took the remote from Bo's hand and turned the television off and pocketed the remote. "Why don't you take Charlie outside and show him the sheep?"

"Fine," Bo muttered. In a louder voice, she looked at me and said, "Come on, Charlie."

I followed Bo outside, and we made our way to meadow surrounded by a split rail fence. There were so many sheep. "How many sheep do you have?" I asked.

"Look, I don't want to talk to you. I think you're weird. Like, you only have one friend, and you're an orphan, and you live by yourself in a mansion. You don't talk much at school, and I don't like you. You don't play with the other kids and just hang out with Jimmy, looking at bugs. I'm only showing you the sheep to make my mom happy," Bo said.

"Wow. Okay," I answered. "Tell me about the sheep, though."

"There were 150, but two were, uh, lost," she said, smirking.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"I lost two sheep a few weeks ago," she said. "Sometimes I take maybe five or six of them to the meadow outside the fence. I'm tall for being five, and I had to prove I could control five sheep inside the pen before I was allowed to take any of them outside the pen. Do you know what they call it when sheep start making noise?"

I shook my head.

"They call it 'bleating.' Two of the sheep wanted to return to the meadow with the rest of the flock, and they started bleating, and the constant noise made me a little crazy. I don't know what came over me," Bo said with an innocent voice, and the smirk on her face proved she was anything but innocent. "I picked up a heavy rock, and I dropped it on the head of the first one. She went down quickly. Then I picked the rock back up, and dropped it on the head of the second sheep. She went down fast, too. There was a lot of blood on the ground. I had to get the other sheep back to the fenced in meadow before they could start freaking out about the two dead sheep." She paused a moment. "I got them back to the pen and went back to the two dead sheep. I wanted to get back there before dark because the death smell would bring out wolves and coyotes, and would jeopardize the rest of the flock. The two that died were only a year old. They weren't large. I went back home to get my wagon, and then loaded them up. There was a ravine, and I could drop them. Eventually they'd be found, and someone would say they had wandered off and succumbed to nature or predators. Only I would know I was the predator." Bo smiled, and smile didn't touch her eyes. It seemed like she was warning me to stay quiet.

"See this?" she asked, and pulled a piece of shearling out of her pocket. It wasn't just the wool, but the sheep's skin, too. "I have a piece from each of the sheep. I cut it off before I dumped their bodies."

I felt my eyes growing wide in equal measures shock, fear, and disbelief.

"It really didn't bother me. When I take the sheep out now, they're all very quiet," Bo said. "Want to see the cat's paw that I got from one of the barn cats?"

"No, I don't," I answered soberly, wanting nothing more than to get away from this sunny little girl who had some warped problem-solving skills. I mean, my problem solving skills weren't much better, but I didn't keep souvenirs, and I didn't plan to expedite anyone else's life to the next realm of existence. "I think I'd like to go back to the house and have some lemonade."

Bo gave a triumphant nod, and we went back toward the house. Before we made it back to the gate, she pointed to a lamb. "See that one? I'm getting that one next. It's small and won't be difficult to haul to the ravine when it's dead."

Oh, my god. This girl.

"Does your mom know?" I asked.

"She might suspect," Bo said. "When I showed her the cat's paw, she looked surprised."

***

"Jimmy, you are never going to believe this," I said, and I told him about my encounter with Bo and the sheep. "She's going after a little lamb next."

"She has to be stopped," he said.

"I know," I answered, "but what can we do? Who can we tell? If she knows it was me, she might come after me."

Jimmy's dad worked for a pest control company, and Jimmy learned all manner of things about all manner of pests. "You know how after a really hard rain, sometimes the copperheads get unearthed?"

"Yeah, that's wild and scary," I admitted.

"I have one in a jar," Jimmy whispered. "We could let it loose one day after a hard rain, like maybe by where she gets off the bus or something."

I thought about it. "She's the kind of girl who would kill the snake and keep the skin for a belt," I said.

Jimmy agreed but said, "But she'd probably get bitten first. We call a teacher for help. Bo goes to the hospital for anti-venom and feels terrible for a good long while. Maybe she decides not to go after the lamb."

"That could work," I said, "but we'd have to stick around to get a teacher. We'd have to watch the whole thing go down."

That night, storms invaded our little corner of the world. The wind howled, drowning out the song of the owls, and turning the lake into something violent and vibrating. Tomorrow morning would be 'operation snake bite.'

Jimmy and I met in front of the school in the morning. He took the jar out of his backpack and let the snake out of the jar, and we watched it slither away from us. It moved toward the bus parked at the curb where Bo was the very first person off the bus (she was always first). She saw the snake, and she didn't yell, scream, or even cower from the thing. She approached the snake, reaching behind her and removing her backpack. She held it aloft. She was good at holding things aloft and dropping them on her prey. In a split second, the snake bit her on the leg, and her backpack came down on the reptile, smashing its head. The snake was dead, and Bo crumpled in a heap next to her backpack. She screamed in pain.

Jimmy and I ran back inside and grabbed the first teacher we could find. "Mrs. Green, Bo was bitten on the leg by a snake…in the bus lane…" I said, winded. Mrs. Green pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed 911. The ambulance arrived in no time, taking Bo and the snake away.

***

Bo's mom came to the estate the following weekend to take photos and tour the grounds.

Grandpa asked, "How's your little Beulah? Charlie said she was bitten by a snake at school earlier this week."

"She's going to have a long recovery," Sharon said. "The snake bit through a nerve, and she's going to have to re-learn how to use her leg. She's going to be in physical therapy for a while to allow other nerve pathways to assist while the bitten nerve heals."

"Wow," I whispered. After the ambulance took Bo away, none of us knew what happened, and we didn't hear any of the teachers whispering about it.

"It could have been worse," Sharon said. "If the ambulance hadn't been called so quickly…and then Beulah managed to kill the snake. The doctors knew exactly what anti-venom to administer. We were lucky. She did ask to have a belt made from the snake's skin, though. A souvenir of the experience, I guess."